


like lightning

by aparticularbandit



Category: The Tick (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 17:57:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18878302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: Baby!Lint backstory, pure and simple.





	like lightning

She was eleven years old the first time she killed someone.

It was supposed to be her birthday, although no one knew for sure if that was the exact date she was born or not.  In fact, the nuns who had taken her in believed that her birthday had to have been sometime earlier – the date they celebrated was simply the one when she’d been left on their doorstep.  Some of the other orphans who’d been abandoned had a letter with them, a blanket with initials or some other identifying mark etched into it, a necklace with a locket and a picture or only half of the charm while another family member might hold onto the other half – _something_ to identify them.  Even the ones who didn’t have some physical material object from their birth parents came with a name attached to them, often pinned to their blankets.

She didn’t.  Just a bawling brown baby in a bundle of blankets so dirty they matched the color her skin left outside on the orphanage’s stairs in the pouring rain.  There hadn’t even been a knock on the huge, intricately carved wooden doors; one of the sisters had found her on their return from a nearby parish, soaked to the bone with her little clumps of black hair stuck to her forehead, so cold she’d been unable to cry.  They’d taken her inside and tried to warm her up, to feed her something (warm milk, mostly), but she’d only shivered, blinked large hazel eyes at them, and refused to do much of anything.

The doctors said she would die from pneumonia within the week.

_She didn’t._

She’d been there a month before the sisters decided on a name for her.  They hadn’t wanted to call her anything while she was sick, too afraid they would lose to her illness or complications from it, and so had only called her _baby girl_ or _the sick one_.  She heard later that one of the older children had peeked in to see what they meant by that, hoping to find some child covered in bright red spots or with purple skin or some other sort of physical atrocity masquerading as the beginnings of a superpower, and when they’d seen nothing but a tiny little baby in a stained white gown staring at them between the metal bars of her crib, they’d been nothing but disappointed.  Then they’d met her eyes and they said they’d felt a _shock_ of something – determination, maybe – and ran away from her, afraid.  But that story didn’t begin to circulate until after the murder, and by then it was just as likely to be a tall tale as a truth.

They eventually named her _Maria_.  She never really liked the name.  She never really liked the orphanage, but no one who lived there did, not even the sisters.  More often than not, she spent her days stealing the few books they had and pouring over them, even the things she didn’t quite understand.  Mostly she read about the women saints – Joan of Arc, especially, was her favorite, even if she hadn’t been an orphan like so many of the other saints that the other children loved.

But, in truth, Maria was never anything like the other orphans.  She was always her own child.  _Special_ , she would have been called, if she’d been someone’s daughter, if she’d belong to someone who actually cared about her, to someone who would have defended her to teachers who thought her dull for not speaking up, despite all of her work being finished on time, even if it wasn’t always the way they wanted it to be done.  They tried to push her into being friends with the other kids, and she would look at them with her big dark eyes and before she could even step in the other orphans’ direction, they ran off and away.

This was fine with her.  With the other children gone, she was free to do what she pleased, and often what she pleased was to break into the candy stores and steal as much candy as her pockets could hold.  The store owners never seemed to notice her, and if they did, they certainly let her get away with it.  When other children began to cry in their sleep, she would let them wake to find little bits of candy waiting for them.  She didn’t care about _them_ by any means; she just couldn’t sleep with their tears ringing in her ears.  Candy distracted them enough for them to quiet down.  That was what really mattered.

The first boy she murdered hadn’t been quiet.  Candy hadn’t helped him either.

Maybe calling it _murder_ was a little harsh.  That would imply some sort of _intent_ to kill, and our little Maria had no such thing.  Only an intent to harm, or, if she’d known she had powers, to _seriously maim_.

Maria was seven years old when the shocks first began.  They’d looked a bit like seizures, a sudden sporadic loss of control of her body and falling to the ground and quivering in place, but there’d been something not quite right about them, something _off_ about the calm look in her dark eyes, even from the first fall, how she hadn’t panicked at the sudden way her body would all of a sudden act as though a large surge of electricity were passing through it, jolting like livewires embedded in her veins.

It didn’t hurt.  Not her, not when anyone touched her, although sometimes they snapped their hands back as though she’d been imbued with some sort of static.  Her hair stuck out, spread as far away from her as it could without snapping entirely—

The sisters thought she was possessed.

Sometimes Maria woke up chained to a bed that wasn’t hers with priests staring at her.  She didn’t know what to think about all of this, and when she seemed to be fine between her seizures, they mostly started just _watching_ her.  As they watched, and as she grew, the seizures grew less and less frequent, until, by the time she turned ten, they were gone entirely.  That didn’t seem to matter to the sisters; they continued to watch her with hawk-like eyes.  They didn’t know where she came from, after all.  She hadn’t even been brought with a name.  Maybe Maria wasn’t as good as they thought.  But then, if she were truly evil, how could she stand inside the church every Sunday morning without burning from the inside out?

* * *

 

A black cat began to find his way around the orphanage.  He was missing one leg and hobbled around three.  One of his ears was half-bitten off.  The other kids hated him, and he hissed at them every time he saw them approaching.  Maria would often sit on the steps into the orphanage and hold out her hand to him.  If he came to her, he did, and if he didn’t, that was okay.  She didn’t have anything better to do with her time.  What few kids had been even remotely interested in her disappeared when the seizures began and the lights around her started flickering as her body quivered and snapped.  She hadn’t minded being alone before, and she didn’t particularly mind it now.  But the sisters no longer let her roam about the little town as freely as they had when she was younger, instead expecting her to return back to their safe care as soon as school was finished for the day.  She was barely even allowed to explore when they took the children to market.  The front steps, at least, were free property when she didn’t want to be cooped up inside any longer.

The more accustomed he grew to her, the more the black cat would come to see her whenever she sat down on the front steps.  He sniffed at her sticky little fingers, and she brushed them along her clothes until the candy was gone and she had strings and lint stuck to them instead.  He looked up at her with bright golden eyes.  His fur was matted in places where Maria was finally allowed to touch it, and he flinched away when she tried to scratch behind his torn ear.

But day after day, he came closer and stayed longer, and eventually, one day, he tapped one paw on her tiny leg, and when she moved her arms out of the way, he crept into her lap, turned around a few times, and curled there with a shuddering, quivering little purr.  Sometimes, when he sat in her lap, his fur began to stand on end, too – mostly when the other orphans would return from wherever they had been exploring, or when the boy and his companions came by, their eyes looking over the little brown girl and the dark cat, lips pressed into scowls.  But that’s what cats did when they were frightened and afraid – poofed their fur out, made it stand on end, and growled and hissed to make their fear and anger known.  Not that he cat in her lap ever _hissed_ at the boys, although many times his sputtering purrs turned to deep, animalistic growls.

They started calling her a witch.  They started saying the cat was her familiar, come to make her more powerful.  It didn’t matter that there was no evidence to back them up, that if they really looked at it, the appearance of the cat seemed to be _draining_ her of her supposed power – she’d had no seizures since the cat’s appearance, and there’d been no flickering lights as she walked down the halls.  Sometimes, when she touched something metal, like the frames of their beds, there was a tiny little shock, but that happened with all the kids.  It might not have been cold where they were, but it was achingly dry, _bone_ dry.  The weather made it all too easy for static to build up and snap at small children’s fingers.

Maria watched them with big wide eyes but didn’t say anything in reply.  She was only ten, and they were bigger than she was.  Her tiny voice would crack if she shouted at them.  The sisters already didn’t like her.  Shouting would make that worse; they’d blame her instead of the boys, _who would be boys_ and _she shouldn’t listen to them_ and even at eleven, she’d seen the sisters comfort enough of the older girls and tell them those same things to believe that she shouldn’t do or say anything either.

The black cat began to wait on the steps of the orphanage for Maria to come out and see him.  The sisters still didn’t like her going into town, but the cat would walk with her to school and back.  He still hissed at other people when they drew too close to him, even when he was with Maria, and she didn’t tell him to do any different, just scratched just between his ears the way he liked it.  Sometimes she could see him through the school windows, chasing after birds, and once he climbed up the tallest tree with a dead crow between his teeth and laid up on one of the branches just next to her window then began pulling the bird apart with his tiny, sharp little claws.

When the rest of the class noticed what was going on, the teachers quickly allowed them to leave their studies.  The ones who were disturbed were moved to another room, and finally only little Maria was left.  She finished her studies just the same as she always did, and when she was finished, she stood in front of the window and pressed her hand against the little glass pane with a frown.  She rubbed her thumb against the glass as though she could reach through and just touch her cat on the other side, brush the blood from his fur.  He licked the blood away himself when he was finished with his meal, washing his face with one ragged old paw.

The teachers told the sisters, and Maria found herself in manacles in bed again one morning.  This time, she was soaked through with what she guessed to be holy water.  She closed her eyes, and when she woke up, she was no longer in chains.  Good enough.  She sat up in the bed and returned to the front of the orphanage, to he steps where she was certain her black cat would be waiting for her.

Her birthday was a week later, and in that time, the boys began to throw rocks at the cat whenever they saw it, even when it was curled up in Maria’s lap.  She began to chase her cat away as soon as she saw them, but that didn’t stop the sharp rocks cutting into her legs or the holes where her cat instinctively dug his claws into her skin before running away.  She took care of the wounds herself with soap and water and sometimes she found that the water stung her hands.  She didn’t dare say anything to the sisters.  If they didn’t care about real people, older people, they’d care even less for her and for the cat.  It wasn’t as though they couldn’t _see_ what was going on; there was still at least one sister situated somewhere nearby to watch her like a hawk, even if she hadn’t been doing anything abnormal but make friends with a stray black cat.

* * *

 

Sometimes, on birthdays, the orphans would wake up with a present waiting for them.  The sisters would give them something to mark the passing of the year – a new hair ribbon or shirt, a new plush toy or a bag of candy – and then, at breakfast, they would have more food than normal, and at lunch, there would be a small cake at school just for them.  It was meant to remind them they’d survived another year; it was meant for them to remember what a birthday was and that they’d had one.  When Maria woke up on her birthday that year, though, there was nothing waiting on her.  She’d had another dream of the manacles and being covered with water, only this time her entire body had ached and still did when she awoke.  She flexed her fingers and placed her bare feet on the stones and didn’t notice when her hand sparked with static when she touched the metal of her bed frame.

There were no indicators of it being her birthday that morning, but she knew, somehow, that it was.  They’d bundled her up in a nice little sweater before sending her off to school, and while she waited for her little black cat to walk with her, he didn’t show up.  She shivered as she continued to the school building without him.  At lunch, they had a small cake for her, something that appeared hastily made – someone must have forgotten, or maybe the school remembered what the sisters didn’t want to acknowledge – so that, at least, was some small confirmation for her young mind.  The teachers kept her late after class to talk to her, but none of it was really important.  She kept looking outside at the bare, naked trees – they were so stark without their leaves in the winter – and waiting on her cat to show himself.

Her head was down when she left the school building, big, dark eyes focused on her boots as she scuffed her feet through the dirt, and that’s when she heard it – the hissing, the yowling, the spitting, and something that sounded like _laughter_.

She ran as fast as her tiny legs would allow for it.

The black cat was cornered against two walls too big for him to jump, and the gaggle of boys who hated her were throwing rocks at him.  His matted fur was shiny in the sunlight, and one of his big golden eyes was missing where there’d always been two before.  He saw Maria with his one good eye and yowled louder and was distracted enough when she stumbled, tripped, and fell to not _dodge_ what looked like a boulder in the largest boy’s hands as he ran towards her.

“ _Stop!_ ”

The boulder landed just as Maria stretched out one tiny hand, and lightning with a loud _boom_ broke from her tiny body and hit the boy square in the back, just between his shoulder blades.  _He stopped._   That was the only thing that mattered.  His skin turned black before she could think enough to stop, and a stench like burnt bacon filled the air as the rest of the gang stared at her and ran away.  She felt tired when she stood and made her way past the boy’s body to that of her cat, even more tired when she had to use all of her strength to move the big rock off of the stray.

She reached out her hand as though to touch the cat, and sparks jumped from her fingers into his broken body.  He woke up and butted his head against her legs, and when she sat cross-legged on the ground, he curled up in her lap and purred as she tried to stroke her fingers through his fur, each new touch bringing another tiny shock of life.

* * *

 

Maria was awake for the manacles this time, the metal that made her fingers spark with static, and she was awake for the holy water they doused her with, awake until the static sparking from the metal tangled with the water covering her skin.  Then she _arced_ with pain, spasms coursing through her worse than the seizures had been as electricity danced along her tiny form.  At first, she wanted to scream, and her mouth opened but no sound came out.  She had no sound left.

As the water evaporated from her skin, the sparks returned to her fingers, static again between their tips and the metal around her wrists.  She regained consciousness to hear one of the priests speaking with one of the sisters, to see through cracked eyelids the door shutting and locking with her inside.

The chains weren’t made for children, but for adults, and left to her own devices, she threaded her tiny hands through each one, rubbed at her raw skin where they’d cut into the back of her wrists, and soon enough made it out of the locked room.  They’re believed it to be impossible, but they hadn’t thought to lock the windows.  She jumped from the windowsill to the nearest tree, dark hair standing all on one end like her cat’s fur when he’d been mad, and climbed down and away.

She didn’t return to her room or her bed until the kids were at school the next day, at the exact moment when the sisters left to take their lunch.  Maybe that was when they first discovered she’d escaped, or maybe they only just discovered she was still alive, too.  She threw what she could carry into a little knapsack, forced her bloody feet into her little boots, pulled her hair out of her face and tied it back with a black ribbon, and then ran.

Maria passed through three cities, and from one country into another, without realizing.  She didn’t notice the change in language, the change in accents, and when the police finally found the scrawny little girl covered in dirt and bone thin from lack of food and asked for her name—

Joan was a saint.  She’d killed a boy.  He deserved it.  Joan killed other soldiers, too.

Her language was faltering, and they called her _Janet_.


End file.
